‘Operation Warp Speed’: Donald Trump takes the victory lap of the Covid vaccine

US President Donald Trump is taking a victory lap ahead of the expected approval of America’s first coronavirus vaccine, as the White House works to inspire confidence in the distribution that will largely be executed by President-elect Joe Biden. .

Trump scheduled an event to celebrate ‘Operation Warp Speed’, his administration’s effort to produce and distribute safe and effective vaccines for Covid-19. The first, from drug maker Pfizer, is expected to receive endorsement from a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel as early as this week, with the delivery of 100 million doses, enough for 50 million Americans, that expected in the coming months.

Trump and his aides hope the event will quell skepticism among some Americans about the vaccine and help build the legacy of the outgoing Republican president.

It comes as deaths from Covid-19 in the United States have soared to more than 2,200 per day on average, and cases per day have dwarfed the 200,000 on average for the first time recorded, and the crisis will almost certainly get worse due to the consequences of people gathering for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years celebrations.

The Operation Warp Speed ​​summit will feature Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and a host of government experts, state leaders, and business executives, as the White House seeks to explain that the vaccine is safe and lay out the administration’s plans to bring it to fruition. the United States. people. But officials from Biden’s transition team, which will oversee most of the largest vaccination program in the country’s history once he takes office on January 20, were not invited.

Officials from the pharmaceutical companies that develop the vaccines were not expected to attend despite receiving invitations, according to people familiar with the matter. Outside the White House, there has been concern that the event contributes to the politicization of the vaccine development process and potentially further inhibits public trust in drugs.

The Trump administration faced new scrutiny on Tuesday after failing to secure an opportunity to purchase millions of additional doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, which has proven highly effective against Covid-19. That decision could delay the delivery of a second batch of doses until Pfizer fulfills other international contracts.

Under its contract with Pfizer, the Trump administration promised to buy 100 million initial doses, with the option to buy up to five times as many.

But this summer, the White House chose not to block an additional 100 million doses for delivery in the second quarter of 2021, according to people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly.

Dr. Moncef Slaoui, who leads the government’s vaccine effort, noted that the Trump administration had been looking at several different vaccines over the summer. He told ABC’s Good Morning America on Tuesday that “no one would reasonably buy more of any of those vaccines because we didn’t know which one would work and which one would be better than the other.”

Concerns about the availability of vaccines arise as Trump signs an executive order Tuesday to prioritize Americans for federally purchased coronavirus vaccines. A senior administration official said the order would restrict the government from delivering doses to other nations until there is an excess supply to meet domestic demand, but it was not immediately clear what the practical impact would be.

The Trump administration insists that between the Pfizer vaccine, another vaccine from Modern Pharma and others in development, the United States will be able to accommodate any American who wants to be vaccinated by the end of the second quarter of 2021.

The decision not to secure additional purchases from Pfizer last summer was first reported by The New York Times. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told NBC that the administration “continues to work with manufacturers to expand the availability of FDA-approved releasable vaccines as quickly as possible … We still have that option for 500 million additional doses “.

While Trump should take credit for the record pace of vaccine development, much of the groundbreaking work was established over the past decade, amid new research on messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccines of the kind developed by Pfizer and Moderna.

“The speed is a reflection of previous years of work,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press this month. “That is what the public has to understand.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s panel of external vaccine experts will meet Thursday for a final review of the Pfizer drug, and will meet later this month to discuss the Moderna vaccine. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of the panel, although it generally does.

The agency’s decisions on the two drugs are expected days after each meeting. Both have been found to be 95 percent effective against the virus that causes Covid-19. The plans call for distributing and then administering about 40 million doses of the two companies’ vaccines by the end of the year, with the first doses to ship within hours of FDA approval.

Biden, who was deploying his senior health team on Tuesday, said last week that in meetings with Trump administration officials, his aides discovered that “there is no detailed plan that we have seen” on how to get vaccines out of containers , in syringes and then in people’s arms.

Trump administration officials insist such plans have been developed, and that most of the work falls to state and local governments to ensure their most vulnerable populations are vaccinated first. In total, about 50,000 vaccination sites are listed in the government’s distribution system, officials said.

Each of the upcoming vaccines has unique logistical challenges related to distribution and administration. Pfizer vaccine must be shipped in super cold temperatures and comes in batches of 975 doses. Each vial contains five doses, which require careful planning. The administration has prepared detailed videos for providers on how to prepare and administer doses safely, which will be released after the FDA issues its emergency use authorization.

One such plan will be announced Tuesday: Pharmacy chains CVS and Walgreens have launched a “mobile vaccination service” ready to vaccinate people in every nursing home and long-term care facility across the country. The roughly 3 million residents of those facilities are among the most vulnerable to Covid-19 and have been placed at the front of the line to access the vaccine, along with more than 20 million healthcare workers. So far, 80 to 85 percent of facilities have joined the service, officials said.

-AP